Colleen Montgomery (United States of America)
1 – Rowan University
Colleen Montgomery
Colleen Montgomery is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at Rowan University. Her current book project explores the industrial, gendered, and transnational dimensions of vocal performance in Disney and Pixar animation.
Abstract
Since the mid-2000s, Disney Animation has significantly expanded its dubbing operations as international box office receipts have come to account for an increasing share of the studio’s profits. Dubbed vocal performance, however, remains an understudied topic in animation studies and sound studies. Addressing this critical gap, this paper examines the industrial and representational politics of Disney’s dubbing practices, taking three dubbed versions of Moana (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2016) as case studies. Moana is particularly germane to such an analysis as Disney produced distinct dubs of the film for the French and French-Canadian markets, as well as a Tahitian language version for the French Polynesian market. This paper offers a comparative analysis of the ways in which macrostructural pressures in each national/industrial context shape the linguistic form, and ideological content of each dubbed version. I first demonstrate how cultural protectionist policies, political tensions surrounding cultural/linguistic identity, and debates over the pedagogical value of animated films as vehicles for language acquisition shape Moana’s dubbed versions. Second, I examine Disney’s strategies for casting vocal performers for characters of color and employing regionally/ethnically accented speech to mark non-white characters as Other. Finally, I consider how Moana’s respective dubbed versions offer radically different articulations of female vocality and female subjectivity.
Palavras-chave: dubbing, sound, vocal performance, representation, gender
